S. Musterd

The Polycentric Urban Region: Towards a Research Agenda

Focuses on the polycentric urban region concept of city planning. Overview of the concept; Factors affecting the growth of cities and towns; Demise of the basic monocentric model at an intraurban level

Social and ethnic segregation in Europe: levels, causes and effects

ABSTRACT: The measurement of segregation, the understanding of its drivers, and the effects of segregation are three interrelated issues that receive ample attention on both sides of the Atlantic. The comparative study of these subjects in Europe is not an easy task because the continent is highly fragmented and diversified. This regards the types of welfare state, but also the multitude of urban histories. Consequently, there is a lack of uniform information. Nevertheless, this paper makes an attempt to sketch the variety of ethnic and social segregation within Europe, using a large number of sources. It is shown that generally segregation levels in Europe are more moderate compared to what we can find in American cities, but these differences are not absolute. The paper also links the levels of segregation with a range of potential explanations and provides a window on European research focusing on effects of segregation.

Housing Mix, Social Mix, and Social Opportunities

Will housing mix create social mix, and will social mix create social opportunity? This question is central in American and European urban debates. In Europe, however, there is a big gap between the political debates and actions regarding these issues and empirical research. In an effort to partly fill this gap, the authors critically evaluated the question above, applying a large-scale longitudinal Swedish data set covering the period 1991 to 1999 and available at the individual level for the entire population. The first part of the article reviews the various policies that are used in different European countries. The second part addresses the empirical analysis.

Neighbourhood effects on social opportunities : the European and American research and policy context

In contemporary European and American urban policy and politics and in academic research it is typically assumed that spatial concentrations of poor households and/or ethnic minority households will have negative effects upon the opportunities to improve the social conditions of those who are living in these concentrations. Since the level of concentration tends to be correlated with the level of spatial segregation the ‘debate on segregation’ is also linked to the social opportunity discussion. The central question is “Do poor neighbourhoods make their residents poorer?” (Friedrichs, 1998), i.e. does the neighbourhood structure exert an effect on the residents (behavioural, attitudinal or psychological) even when controlling for individual characteristics of the residents? The issue of neighbourhood effects on social opportunities of residents possesses rich geographical, sociological, economic and psychological dimensions, and as such has offered a locus for multi-disciplinary investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. Such diversity is amply demonstrated in this Special Issue of Housing Studies, with economists, geographers, planners and sociologists, hailing from Germany, the Netherlands, UK and USA, represented among the contributors. These diverse perspectives often intersect in two realms: spatial relationships and selective household mobility. The spatial focus of neighbourhood effect studies is clear, for example, in economic geographical studies about the spatial mismatch between demand and supply on the labour market (Kasarda et al., 1992). The thesis here is that economic restructuring has led to a situation in which the peripheral locations of suitable jobs for unskilled workers and inner-city residential locations of these potential workers have grown too far from each other to enable matching on a daily basis; this would aggravate the social conditions of those who live in inner-city areas. The spatial element is also evident in the research underpinnings of American housing policy aimed at changing the locations of low-income or minority households (Briggs, 1997; Del Conte & Kling, 2001; Katz et al., 2001; Ludwig et al., 2001; Rosenbaum, 1995; Rosenbaum et al., 2002). These American policies for changing the spatial distribution of the disadvantaged are related to European ideas about ‘mixed neighbourhood policies’ that nowadays receive considerable attention and critiques (Atkinson & Kintrea, 2001; Kearns,

Neighbourhood effects and social mobility: a longitudinal analysis

What impact do neighbourhoods have on social mobility? For years, this question has received widespread international attention in scholarly debates and within society at large. This paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by presenting the results of an investigation into the relationship between household social mobility and the composition of the residential environment. The analyses are based on an extensive empirical longitudinal study conducted in the Netherlands. The most remarkable conclusion is that, in the Dutch context, the environment has only a modest influence on the social mobility of households with a weak economic position. It was found that the chance of a household living purely on welfare benefits at the beginning of the study period to escape the ‘welfare trap’ was barely dependent on the number of similarly challenged households in the immediate vicinity. Interestingly, the environment proved to have a more powerful effect on the social mobility of households with a stronger economic position. The probability that households with at least one paid job at the beginning of the research would still have a job at the end clearly decreases as the share of benefit-dependent households in the neighbourhood rises. A possible explanation for this is that for the first category (weak starting position) the negative effect of their own welfare situation is far more determinative for their future prospects than the compo sition of their environment. Because these negative individualistic conditions are absent for the second category (stronger starting position), environmental factors may play a relatively larger role. Another interpretation is that area-based policies are not just targeting the areas with bigger problems more intensively, but especially the long-term unemployed in these areas, and not so much the short-term unemployed (those who had a job at the start of the research period and lost the job afterwards).

Segregation and integration: A contested relationship

Many assume that high levels of social and/or ethnic segregation, which often go hand-in-hand with high levels of ethnic concentration, will obstruct integration and participation in society. Concentration is also felt to hamper the social mobility of those with a weak social position and/or low skills, particularly immigrants of non- Western origin. Although these ideas may have some validity in contexts where extremely high levels of social and ethnic segregation exist, they are hardly tested in contexts with more moderate levels of segregation and stronger welfare states. This paper addresses this deficiency by providing some evidence on the relationship between segregation and integration in Dutch cities, Amsterdam in particular. The findings show that, where a relationship between segregation and integration does exist, it is not a very strong one. In Amsterdam some similarly segregated population categories appear to perform differently in terms of integration. In addition, the social mixture of the residential environment hardly has any effect on the social mobility of those living there. On the other hand, I find that the level of social inequality in society is important for understanding the level of segregation. Educational programmes and variations in labour market access are crucial for understanding variations in integration. Conse quently, programmes that are aimed at de-segregation, mainly by mixing neighbour hoods socially and ethnically, will probably contribute little to enhancing integration in society.

Social Exclusion and Opportunity Structures in European Cities and Neighbourhoods

The increased research and policy interest in social exclusion has included a focus on the concentration of disadvantage within cities. The role of neighbourhoods in the dynamics of social exclusion is consequently receiving greater attention. This paper reports the results of a major European research programme designed to explore the neighbourhood dimension of social exclusion. The results raise important issues related to the differential opportunities associated with neighbourhoods and the conceptualisation of neighbourhood effects as well as issues for policy. Understanding the role of neighbourhood in social exclusion involves attention to different levels of analysis and different fault lines and to the resources that are produced within neighbourhoods.

Multi-ethnic metropolis : patterns and policies

Preface. 1. Ethnic Segregation and Policy: Introduction. 2. The Netherlands: Amsterdam and the Specification of the Conceptual Framework. 3. Belgium: Brussels. 4. Germany: Frankfurt am Main and Dusseldorf. 5. Great Britain: London and Manchester. 6. Sweden: Stockholm. 7. France: Paris. 8. Canada: Toronto. 9. Ethnic Segregation in Nine Metropolises. Interviewed. Appendices. Literature. About the Authors.

Understanding Urban Inequality: A Model Based on Existing Theories and an Empirical Illustration

In the debate on urban inequality, Sassens theory on social polarization and Wilsons theory on spatial mismatch have received much attention. Where Sassen highlights the decline of the middle classes, Wilson focuses on the upgrading of urban labour markets. In this article we argue that both theories may be valid, but that they have to be put in a more extended theoretical framework. Of central importance are national institutional arrangements, membership of different ethnic groups and networks, and place-specific characteristics rooted in local socio-economic histories. As a first empirical illustration of our model, we use data on the labour markets of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and show that different forms of inequality can be found both in economic sectors and within ethnic groups. The model we present could be used both to reinterebatpret existing data and as an analytical framework for the analysis of different forms of urban inequality. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

What Mix Matters? Exploring the Relationships between Individuals' Incomes and Different Measures of their Neighbourhood Context

There is substantial interest among policy makers in both Western Europe and North America in reducing concentrations of disadvantaged households through initiatives to enhance the ‘social mix’ of neighbourhoods. However, there is little consideration or understanding with regard to which mix of household characteristics matters most in influencing the socio-economic outcomes for individual residents. This paper explores the degree to which a wide variety of 1995 neighbourhood conditions in Sweden are statistically related to earnings for all adult metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women during the 1996–99 period, controlling for a wide variety of personal characteristics. The paper finds that the extremes of the neighbourhood income distribution, operationalized by the percentages of adult males with earnings in the lowest 30th and the highest 30th percentiles, hold greater explanatory power than domains of household mix related to education, ethnicity or housing tenure. Separating the effects of having substantial shares of low and high income neighbours, it is found that it is the presence of the former that means most for the incomes of metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women, with the largest effects for metropolitan men.